On the ride from Las Vegas’s McCarran Airport to the Nighthawks’ hotel, Joe stands up in front of the bus and repeats an admonition he’d delivered to his players the night before—one that might have come directly out of his Merrill playbook.
“Guys, if you’re going to gamble, remember my one piece of advice: know your limit. Set that limit before you go out, and stick to it. Okay?”
Suddenly, there’s a shout from the back of the bus. “What’s your limit, coach?” It’s Dusty Dvoracek, the scruffy nose tackle.
The players chuckle. Joe stops for a second, rumples his brow, and scratches his chin.
“Twenty-five million,” he says, beaming. “And not a nickel more.”
As the Nighthawks’ bus threads its way through the dense Vegas traffic on the day before their third game of the season, the players stare, wide-eyed and mute, at the monuments to human excess that line the road—a miniature pyramid and Pharaoh, a Manhattan skyline, the gold sheen on the windows of the Mandalay Bay, a forty-foot-tall neon cowboy, and Steve Wynn’s absurdly paradisiacal eighteen-hole golf course in the middle of it all. Vegas is a city built to distract humans from thoughts of anything other than pleasure. In other words, it’s not an ideal place for a traveling team to fly into and keep their heads focused on a football game.
And despite the meetings and meals and the 11:00 p.m. bed check and the fact that the Nighthawks are staying at the Renaissance Hotel—owned by the Mormon Marriott family and thus absent any in-hotel slot machines—the players and coaches will still have some free time on their hands. There is always time in Vegas. Joe’s players are adults. Telling them about limits can act only as a reminder—a plea, really—to stay focused. It’s a tall task.
Bill Hambrecht, the owner of the UFL, also owns the Las Vegas Locomotives. He had handpicked Jim Fassel to be his coach, and his team has had basically the same staff and many of the same players for three straight seasons, making them pretty much the opposite of the Nighthawks. That continuity has been beneficial. Under Fassel, Las Vegas won the UFL’s first two championships.
The Locos play in the thirty-seven-thousand-seat Sam Boyd Stadium, home to the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels football team, and a solid twenty-minute drive (if there’s no traffic) from the Strip. The stadium is named after an Okie who supposedly showed up in Vegas in 1941 with just $80 to his name, then somehow lived the Las Vegas dream, eventually turning that pocket change into one of the world’s largest gaming companies.
Unfortunately for the UFL, the Locos—off the field, anyway—seem to be doing the opposite, which happens to be the more common experience for Vegas visitors: They’re turning a large fortune into a small one.
When it came to a limit, the owners of the UFL had decided that theirs was somewhere around $115 million. That’s how much Hambrecht, Mayer, Pelosi, and a handful of smaller investors had already bet, and lost, on the league. The question now is whether they are willing to open their wallets any further.
Football is an expensive sport to put on, what with its large number of players, coaches, and supporting staff, its massive amount of equipment, and its insurance and stadium costs. Throw in a dash of mismanaged funds, no revenue-producing national broadcast contract, and a fan base that has become apprehensive about spending season-ticket money after the league’s false start in July, and the cost of keeping the UFL afloat becomes potentially crippling.
In 2011, pretty much all league revenues will come through gate receipts. Omaha, Virginia, and even winless Sacramento have had attendance figures that average around fifteen thousand fans per game, down from 2010, thanks to the season’s delay, but still solid. But this is Las Vegas’s first home game, and the outlook for even a mediocre showing of fans looks very bleak. The game is being played on a Saturday night in a town with a lot of other options that don’t require a twenty-minute cab ride to a stadium in the middle of the desert. It’s also the first night of Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holy day of fasting and praying (and of not attending football games). With the UFL so reliant on gate money, the expected poor attendance at this game is ominous.
The UFL players and fans don’t know that at this point in the season—only two games in—the league has already come close to shutting down not just once, as happened quite publicly in July, but numerous times. Two days after Joe’s first game, Joe and his fellow coaches had gotten a call from the league’s owners. The UFL’s financial troubles, they had been assured in August, had been patched up for the 2011 season. It turned out that they weren’t. Loans to the league owners had not come through as planned. Amazingly, there was talk about canceling the season after the first week of games.
Unbeknownst to the players, those calls had kept coming, on a nearly weekly basis. The league limped on.
The Locos enter the game with the same 1-1 record as the Nighthawks. They, too, lost to Virginia and squeaked by Sacramento. The scouting report on the Las Vegas team is fairly straightforward. Their defense is very aggressive. Their safeties are large and hard-hitting, but prone to giving up big plays. Fassel calls the offensive plays and, like Schottenheimer, runs a conventional professional scheme—quarterback under center, lots of runs on first down, three-receiver sets on passing plays with his big tight ends acting as checkdown safety valves.
Olivadotti knows Fassel well from the four years they spent together with the Giants, where Olivadotti was the linebackers coach. One might think that Olivadotti’s familiarity with Fassel—and the other two UFL coaches, for that matter—might help him better prepare his defense. But he doesn’t think so. “It doesn’t matter, really,” he says. “These guys are all good coaches. They’ll adjust to what they see of us on tape. Then we’ll adjust right back.”
Leading up to the Vegas game, Olivadotti’s been in a bit of a mood, walking around the Kroc Center even more slowly than usual, occasionally stopping in midstride to shake his head. He’s like a grumpy, white-haired bear who’s been woken up early from his winter nap. His secondary is banged up. Two key members—Dovonte Edwards and DeMarcus Faggins—will miss the Vegas game due to injuries. And cornerback Reynaldo Hill, though he will play, is slowed considerably by turf toe. “We’re running the JV team out there this week,” Olivadotti growls.
Generally speaking, there are three types of football head coaches: The detail-oriented bureaucrats, like the Washington Redskins’ Mike Shanahan, who obsess over every play in the game plans; the generals, like the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, who rely on their offensive and defensive coordinators to put together the plans and merely manage these men, providing feedback and insight when needed; and those who fall somewhere between these two poles.
Joe is a general. For him, being a head coach is exactly like being a CEO. He hires people he trusts, then lets them do their jobs. His role, as he sees it, is to coach the coaches, and to inspire and motivate the players. Andrus draws up every offensive snap in practice, then crafts the entire game plan for the offense. Olivadotti does the same on his side of the ball. Joe leans on both men, and particularly Olivadotti, to run practices. What Joe excels at in coaching is what he excelled at in business. He provides perspective and an overview. Amy calls this talent of Joe’s “the flyover.”
“Joe sees the desert, the river, and the trees. Everyone down on the ground can get so worried and wrapped up in putting the fire out in the trees that they don’t see the river of water running right nearby,” she says. “When people get stressed and emotional, they get lower to the ground. But he stays up there. He does this survey thing when he can see it all and help people figure it all out.”
What Joe sees in the week leading up to the Vegas game is something he doesn’t like: mistakes. “We’ve been repeating the same ones over and over. Offsides on the kickoffs, false starts on the offensive line. These are all mental mistakes. And that’s all on us, the coaches. I need to do a better job. We all need to do a better job,” he tells his coaches.
The penalties are clearly driving him nuts. “In my coaching years—and yes, I know they were twenty-eight years ago, but this is still relevant—my teams always had the fewest penalties in the league. This was something I prided myself on. Now we are leading the UFL in penalties, by a lot. We need to fix that.”
The shortened camp and season are big reasons for the mistakes, Joe concedes. But they are not excuses. He still believes that Andrus and Kent continue to try to do too much. In coaching and in business, Joe’s forte has been getting people to simplify and to focus on the things that matter, to play to what he calls (in unadulterated business speak) their “core competencies.”
“It’s the beginning of our fifth week together. If you have twenty-five things that are your priorities, that tells me you have no priorities. Let’s pare it down, do a few things and do them very, very well.”
Five minutes before the start of the game, after warm-ups, Joe gathers the team together in the locker room at Sam Boyd Stadium. They’ve all heard the rumors about the paltry crowd that’s expected, and they’ve seen for themselves that not many fans were in the seats for warm-ups. “Don’t worry about that,” Joe tells them. “There is nothing we can do about it. Just go out there and block it out just as you would block out a huge crowd.”
Then he rolls into the pregame prayer, a common occurrence in football locker rooms around the country. During his prayer, Joe physically mimics some of the moves of a seasoned televangelist. He clenches his eyes shut. His voice rises and falls at key moments. Sweat beads on his brow. But the content of his prayers is different, in a big way. As offensive lineman Damion Cook puts it: “Man, sometimes it seems like Coach Joe is coaching God, too.”
“Dear Father, we ask that you keep everyone on our team and theirs free from serious injury today. We’ve talked about respect, about having courage and dedication. We’ve talked most importantly about being a man, about standing on our own two feet and accepting responsibility for our own actions. Father, help us to be men! Help us with this concept of manhood. Help us not to quit on the field, to play every down as hard as we can.”
Then everyone in the locker room holds hands, and Joe says: “Our Father, who art in heaven…,” kicking off the Lord’s Prayer, which is recited communally—at warp speed—by the team. Not all of the players and coaches are Christians, but they all at least mouth the prayer. A football game is its own foxhole.
The Nighthawks take the field. Everyone in the stadium can see Bill Hambrecht, who is standing tall in a suite above the field. But the stands are virtually empty. Officially, the UFL will later announce a crowd of 6,500; in actuality, it looks more like 2,000. The lack of fans creates the sensation of a game being played in a canyon. Kicked balls echo up to the top row. Shouts from individual fans are heard with distinct clarity (“Omaha sucks!”). “There aren’t even enough fans here to take down a goalpost,” says defensive line coach Brandon Noble. The stadium may be the only lifeless place in Las Vegas. The eerie silence seems to affect the players, many of whom were accustomed to having more people than this attend their high school games. There is a distinct listlesness on the field, a lack of what Olivadotti says is the key to any game: emotion.
The first two series for each team result in punts, the ball yo-yoing back and forth, with not much field position advantage gained by either team. Then Vegas gets a big play, a forty-seven-yard pass from scrambling quarterback Chase Clement to receiver Andrae Thurman. The ball ends up at the Omaha 6-yard line. And somehow, Olivadotti’s defense holds the Locos to a field goal attempt, which is partially blocked. But the ball manages to tumble, end over end, above the bar of the goalpost.
On the next possession, Masoli overthrows his receiver and the Locos intercept and get the ball at the Omaha 17. And again, the defense stands tall. Another field goal makes it 6–0 Las Vegas. The Nighthawks have nothing going on offense, with their drives stalling after just a few plays. Late in the second quarter, behind the physical running of former Arizona Cardinal tailback Marcel Shipp, the Locos again get into the red zone, but have to settle for yet another field goal.
On the sideline, Joe is more animated than he has been in the first two games. He’s becoming more assertive, especially with the players. “I’m proud of you guys!” he yells to the defense as they leave the field after a stop. He pats Masoli on a shoulder pad. “Let’s go, Jeremiah. You can do this. Just calm down out there. Just concentrate. See the play. Play with your head.”
Joe is trying to spark something in his team—anything. But it doesn’t seem to be working. Everything about this game—the players, the fans—is lethargic.
At halftime, despite the fact that the Omaha offense has been completely impotent (they’ve held the ball for only eight minutes in the entire half), Omaha is down just 9–0 and is very much still in the game.
But in the second half, the Nighthawks’ emotional apathy begins to take a physical toll. The Locos drive for a touchdown on their first possession, extending their lead to 16–0. Omaha loses key players on nearly every series. Shaud Williams, the team’s best all-around running back, suffers a concussion. Dusty Dvoracek, the space-eating nose tackle, tears the posterior cruciate ligament in his knee. Chad Jackson, Omaha’s best receiver, also tears a knee ligament.
But the most soul-crushing injury comes late in the third quarter. The Nighthawks finally string together a long drive, propelled by the running of John Griffin and Garrett Wolfe. They settle for a Wolfert field goal. On the ensuing kickoff, with the Nighthawks hustling down the field to cover the kick, there is what sounds like a shotgun blast that reverberates throughout the empty stadium. When the returner is finally tackled and the play is whistled dead, a Nighthawk player lies sprawled on the ground, arms and legs akimbo. It looks as if he has fallen asleep in the midst of making snow angels. Several Locos players are jumping up and down, screaming and beckoning to the Nighthawks bench to send in trainers. The player on the ground has not moved an inch.
The dual image of opposing players in a frenzied panic and a motionless body lying on the turf is terrifying. It’s one of those sickening moments when even the most diehard football fans question their love of the game, wondering why they watch and patronize such a sport, and, perhaps, why anyone is willing to play it. The injured player is Mike O’Connell, the spirited rookie safety who made the Nighthawks team thanks in large part to a huge hit he delivered on a special teams play during the Omaha intrasquad scrimmage. Right now he is a large X lying on the field, out cold because of a huge hit made on him during this special teams play. Trainers rush to his side. Paramedics jump out of the field-side ambulance without being summoned, wheeling out a gurney and a backboard. The quiet crowd somehow grows even more silent. Five minutes pass as they work on him. It seems like an eternity.
O’Connell had been the first man down the field for the Nighthawks. He’d drawn a bead on the kick returner, but had failed to see the returner’s lead blocker, the “up man,” coming in from his right. The blocker had launched himself into O’Connell and delivered a vicious, but legal, helmet-to-helmet hit. The blow severely dented O’Connell’s face mask.
As soon as the paramedics get to O’Connell they strap him to the backboard and cut off his jersey in the shape of a cross. He wakes up as his face mask is being screwed off (the paramedics leave his helmet on as a precautionary measure) and finally, to much relief on and off the field, he moves his arms and legs. He’s rushed to the hospital. He has suffered a nasty concussion. His season, which once seemed likely to blossom into at least a shot with an NFL team, is now over.
Despite a late touchdown throw from Masoli, the game essentially ends when Clement runs for a six-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter. Shipp adds insult with a twenty-eight-yard touchdown run on a fourth-and-one play that puts the Locos up 30–10. Olivadotti leaves his perch in the box early to come down the field with a few minutes still left to play. His eyes are more bloodshot than usual. He apologizes profusely to Joe on the sidelines. He knows Joe counts on him to be his rock. “I’m embarrassed as hell. I let us all down tonight,” he tells his friend and boss.
The loss is a total psychological and physical beat-down. Joe’s team is outgained and thoroughly outplayed. The Nighthawks have lost four key players to injuries during the game, and perhaps for the season.
Hambrecht greets Joe on the field as he walks to the locker room. There is a brief discussion about the lack of fans and what that means for the league. “Well, we’ll see where we go from here,” Hambrecht sighs. The season, Joe knows, is again in peril. He desperately doesn’t want it to end like this.
In the locker room, Joe leads a prayer for O’Connell, who will, somehow, make the team flight home just three hours later. Joe prays more intently than usual.
If the season continues, the Nighthawks will play the Locos again in Omaha in just six days.